Family and Community Relations and Intervention with Infants Reflections

This week I learned a lot about Ages and Stages assessments and the benefits that come from giving those assessments to children at young ages!  One thing that I did not know until class on Friday was how to find the chronological age.  I like math when I can understand it and this math I can understand, haha so it was fun to do!  This will help me as I prepare to do the ages and stages assessment with my kids! In class today we talked about how as we do home visits we should focus on the same skill but to use different activities!  I liked this advice and am excited to plan my home visits around this idea!  At the moment I am still curious about the correct language and terminology I need to use while talking to the parents so I don’t say anything on accident to offend them or make them worried. Weekly Quote: “Think of different ways to adapt!”

I loved this week’s readings! I have been waiting for a class like this my whole time here at college!  I am so excited that I get to start learning more about working with families with special needs children.  In chapter one it talks about the various characteristics a family may have and from those characteristics, how working with families and their children can be so different from one family to the next.  It is important to me to study these so in the future when I am working with families I will be able to best help them depending on their family status and circumstances.  In chapter two it talks lot about that next step of interacting with the family and how to do so with different types of families such as foster parents, same sex parents, and/or single parent families!  I also liked the analogy of the mobile and how it explains that if one part of the family is affected the rest of the family is affected as well! As I was re...

The disability that I was given was a social disorder, where I had to change the topic of the conversation multiple times throughout the span of a whole day. This was actually really hard for me because I love talking to people and the day that I chose to do this I actually saw a lot of people that I know and that I have not heard from in a while. As we were talking and I would change the topic out of random it caught those that I was communicating with a little off guard and they would look at me kind of funny and then keep talking. As I would talk with some people they would eventually realize something was up and ask me if I was okay.  At this point I would explain to them the assignment and then we would actually be able to catch up without my ‘disability’ getting in the way. This really opened my eyes as I look back on the experience because there are really people who struggle with this disability and don’t have the option to ‘turn it off’ when things bec...

Weekly Quote: “Identify interests and motivating factors” I liked this quote because it is something that we should not only strive to do with our infants but with the parents, with ourselves, and with any other child or peer we are trying to work with in the future!  As we identify interests and motivating factors with whoever we are working with we are able to understand them better and be able to better connect with them! One thing that I learned this week was that ‘Natural Environments’ means settings that are natural or normal for the child’s age peers who have no disabilities to the maximum extent appropriate to the needs of the child. So a natural environment for a child with disabilities will be a lot different and will have different components. I really liked in class where it said that our primary role is to work with and ‘support’ family members and caregivers.  The main word I really liked in that sentence is support.  We are not goi...

Weekly Quote: “Be Organized” -I know that this is a pretty short quote but I really like it because it applies so much to every aspect of my life.  When this was said in class we were talking about section 504 of the rehabilitation act and how if we want to make sure that we are following all the rules and also giving the best to our children we need to make sure that we are organized in all of our work. Keeping all the documents and files in their correct place and not only giving the children the best education we can but also keeping things organized and clear for the parents of the children! This week I learned a lot about ADA, IFSP and 504.  I had never heard of these three things before (at least I do not recall hearing them before).  I really enjoyed reading through the material and our lessons in class as we learned about what these things entailed and how we can use them in our future carriers. To be able to expound and further my knowl...

I am so extremely excited for this class!  I love my major because it not only teaches me what I need to for future jobs, but it also teaches me valuable lessons for when I am a future mom! During my second semester here at BYU-I I took the Infant and Toddler Development class and learned a lot about the early stages of development of infants and the great importance those first years of life are for the children.  I feel like a lot of what I learned from that class will help me with what we learn about in this class.  In my Infant and Toddler Development class I did a home visit with a 3 month old little girl and then I have also done several home visits for my Toddler lab so I do have a little experience on how those go.  As I mentioned in my RB for ECSE 421, I went to Romania this last fall.  While I was there we were able to go to the children hospital and spend time with any children there that were orphans and did not have parents to stay there with them a...

I am very excited to take this class!!  I am ready to learn about how I can help other families and their children be able to find the help that they need wherever they live and am also excited to have that information and knowledge for myself so that in the future I will be able to use what I learn in this class with my future family.  One of the main reasons I am excited to take this class is because, at the moment, I am not super familiar with anything that is taught in this class! All I know is that this class will help prepare me to help others, especially special needs children, whom I love with all my heart!  I love working with special needs children, this last fall semester I was able to work with orphans with disabilities in Romania.  This was the most amazing and eye opening experience in my life and I am so grateful I was able to go, although, I wish I would have had more information about how I could better help those sweet orphans in their development...